It is not a joke when political correctness is taken too far, by Patrick Cook. First it was Bill Leak, now another of Australia’s foremost cartoonists complains trenchantly about PC.
You might like to tell them where the term “political correctness” originated, and what it meant. SnapChat or Instagram illustrations of Stalin will help you to connect with the young folk. It meant that you will follow the party line or we will shoot you and your family will disappear. We don’t do that sort of thing nowadays, of course, unless we are bearded maniacs, advocates for and concerned citizens of the Islamic State community, and you have made mock of or questioned our motivation.
Political correctness is not enforced to protect the sensibilities and shield the vulnerabilities of the helpless and the different and the unfairly maligned. It is enforced to enhance the conceit and swell the power of the enforcers. Blessed are the righteous, to be sure, but the self-righteous are pains in the arse. Political correctness is as insidious and as silent (it thrives on silence) as herpes. It is progressive in the way that gangrene is progressive, awfully difficult to reverse. …
The problem is when and where do we prevent these PC pod people from dictating our thoughts, commanding our lives? The how is easy. We continue to call “bullshit”. In public, through every medium. Well, almost every medium. Twitter and Google are lost already, alas. The price of the right to call “bullshit” is eternal vigilance. Because when the enforcers, your actual totalitarians and authoritarians, the arbiters of political correctness, are in absolute power, they are traditionally touchy subjects.
And here is what he recommends:
Here’s how it works. If you disapprove of the import of a joke, do not repeat it. Do not seek to pass laws to prevent the joke happening. If you disapprove of pictorial representations of people, and caricature springs to mind, do not draw them. Do not shoot people who do not think as you do. If you feel that the subject of a joke has somehow become the subject of a joke, and you wish to shelter the Irishman’s feelings, simply do not laugh. If you are a pod person, you will be across the not laughing part already. The Irishman will be laughing. Then he will tell you the one about the three Australians. As nature intended.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
